Abstract
Measurements of the properties of binary neutron star systems from gravitational-wave observations require accurate theoretical models for such signals. However, current models are incomplete, as they do not take into account all of the physics of these systems: some neglect possible tidal effects, others neglect spin-induced orbital precession, and no existing model includes the post-merger regime consistently. In this work, we explore the importance of two physical ingredients: tidal interactions during the inspiral and the imprint of the post-merger stage. We use complete inspiral–merger–post-merger waveforms constructed from a tidal effective-one-body approach and numerical-relativity simulations as signals against which we perform parameter estimates with waveform models of standard LIGO-Virgo analyses. We show that neglecting tidal effects does not lead to appreciable measurement biases in masses and spin for typical observations (small tidal deformability and signal-to-noise ratio ). However, with increasing signal-to-noise ratio or tidal deformability there are biases in the estimates of the binary parameters. The post-merger regime, instead, has no impact on gravitational-wave measurements with current detectors for the signal-to-noise ratios we consider.
2 More- Received 29 August 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.084061
© 2018 American Physical Society